Agile 2010 Keynote by Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas talked about a lot stuff so I pulled out the bits that resonated with me and bear emphasis.

Starting with the top right and going clockwise, I’ll make a few comments…

There is no Agile toothfairy to make all the problems go away. A lot of companies only look to Agile when things are really broken. It took your company a long time to create the mess that it is in and it is going to take a while to get out of it. Agile will help and provides a direction and it is going to take hard work. Sorry.

When you have no automated tests in place, acceptance tests add much more value than unit tests. So, consider starting here before learning about JUnit, refactoring and working with Legacy Code.

TDD (Test Driven Design) is a huge technical contribution to the community that stands independent of Agile. It is an amazingly powerful design practice.

We were reminded that a flat org structure with a technical career ladder is essential in a well-functioning organization. It is important to keep your top technical people in technical roles.

Dave has seen the rise of what he calls blue collar programming. So many environments are filled with legacy code. Programmers have to sweat out meaningless design-dead code just to make things work.